I hate to say it, but i knew this was an issue in the beta back in December. As much as i love Veeam and know not to update in production, i have a lab where i have found Nakivo works. Ironically, VCSA now has a better backup tool fo my lab.This isn't full proof, but i have to give Veeam heck for the delay, on every release.

Veeam support and management, this is my only gripe, the delay for new releases. I understand the logistics of getting it right, for production purposes this is great, but i am testing NOW for later this summer. I cant wait to get 9.5u3a? and resume additional testing.

Please pass this along to management as i certainly understand support, but testing is another opportunity for updates.

We require the features of 6.7 (windows failover clusters + vvols), but we have to wait for Cisco to release their stuff for 6.7, so until then we wanted to toss vcenter 6.7 in play to get use to the interface early. That was a mistake. Besides half of my vmware stuff backs up sometimes... the 6.7 migrate is also broke and uses a different native password for the postgresql database that is built in the vcsa. I knew better... but still did it.

Veeam says after all 3a requirements are met, but frankly i don't care about windows 10 RS4... It has nothing to do with my virtual environment. Ironically with everything else at stake here, i absolutely update minute 1 in LABs, not PROD.

It's all good to make fun and all, but I've had no issues with VMWare updates, yet have spent months with Veeam to finally get reliable backups. With 6.7 going GA, I thought GA meant that all of the VMWare partners (especially the major ones) have had access to all the alpha, beta, RC, RTM code, and had most of the issues worked out to support by GA date. Apparently, something as simple as actually backing up data won't work anymore until who knows when Veeam will release a patch. Also, I don't think that a courtesy email informing Veeam customers that 6.7 breaks Veeam B&R would be that hard to do.

@cgrossman I get what your saying I really do, but as responsible admin the onus is on you to carry out all necessary re-requisite checks, and that includes all your Vendors (i.e. Backup Vendors, Monitoring Vendors, Hardware Vendors), that they fully support the latest version of the software you are upgrading.

cgrossman wrote:It's all good to make fun and all, but I've had no issues with VMWare updates, yet have spent months with Veeam to finally get reliable backups. With 6.7 going GA, I thought GA meant that all of the VMWare partners (especially the major ones) have had access to all the alpha, beta, RC, RTM code, and had most of the issues worked out to support by GA date. Apparently, something as simple as actually backing up data won't work anymore until who knows when Veeam will release a patch. Also, I don't think that a courtesy email informing Veeam customers that 6.7 breaks Veeam B&R would be that hard to do.

It's important to note that, at least for VMware, it is not historically true that partners had some access to the GA code prior to release. Typically, as a partner, we've had access to the same code that all beta participants had, and VMware has a major history of making significant changes between the final release they provide partners and the code they ship in GA. In many cases the VDDK, or some other critical section of the API, had changes in the final GA release that required significant amounts of work, almost fully negating all work done by our dev and QA during the Beta/RC cycles.

Due to this, unlike some of our competitors, Veeam has never attempted to release "day 1 support" for VMware releases because we don't want to claim such things, which will lead to even more people upgrading quickly, and then have to scramble to write KB articles on all the things that don't actually work. For example, I can remember one case where one of our competitors trumpeted their "day 1 support" of a VMware release and specifically called out how they were delivering this support "faster than Veeam", only to have to write a KB article that described how you couldn't do restores, and several other functions, due to changes in the GA code. By the time they had the issues patched, Veeam had released a fully QA'd update with full support of all features.

I get that we are all excited to try new things, we here at Veeam are the same. We just don't feel it does a service to our customers to ship code and integration that hasn't been fully tested and proven to work with the actual shipped code from VMware. Backups are important, perhaps more important today, with the threat of ransomware, than any time in recent history. Being sure that backup, replication, instant restore, Surebackup, and all of the features work with the final GA code is important. I'll admit, I don't know if VMware made code changes between their last Beta/RC build and their final GA this time around, but it wouldn't surprise me, because it has happened in many previous releases.

Great counter-points, tsightler! I really appreciate your detailed perspective on the challenges of day 1 support, and the importance of proper time for Q&A. This was something I ran into first-hand, back when I was at IBM in the fall of 2014, helping prep Day 1 VVol documentation for vSphere 6.0.

Note that my exuberant comment about 6.7 above was a LAB test of ESXi 6.7, just kicking the tires to learn/document with no production workloads, prepping for when the next Veeam B&R release arrives, with fully tested and stated 6.7 support.